Certainly MTG Arena introduces uncertainty into MTGO speculation and you make a good point on this front. If MTG Arena is up and running, and draft leagues are replicated there and are much cheaper, then the value of all draft sets on MTGO will drop.

However, boosters are very liquid, so there should be plenty of advance notice from Beta version testing. If there is any information that becomes actionable, I’ll be sure to bring it up. For the moment, it’s steady as she goes until Beta testing starts and more details of MTG Arena are revealed.

Yes, it is too bad! This is really the last time this strategy will be employable.

Buying all the mythics is correct, but if you already have your fill of the bulk mythics, I would not focus on these. Many are already double or triple the price from a few months ago so I don’t think the bulk myhthics are good value at the moment.

Also, it’s important to target the Modern playable rares. Collective Brutality and Thought Knot Seer come to mind right off the bat. These will be holding value too. If you look at Dragons of Tarkir, most of the value in that set resided in the Modern playable rares.

Thanks so mucho for your help!

I don’t use any financial tools, I’m just logging data in a spreadsheet.

I used to have it automated in excel and would collect prices almost on a daily basis, but then supernova starting to have unreliable prices so I had to start manually entering goat set prices. More recently, mtgstocks made it harder to scrape set prices using excel. Weekly prices seem to be fine for the kind of big picture speculating I favor anyway.

Some of my earlier articles talked about the ratio more often, but I wasn’t sure about its predictive value so I stopped publishing it.

https://goo.gl/ar8FAS

https://goo.gl/1xzV2V

Those ratios are interesting. Question do you have financial tools that you use to check this sort of stuff, or do you just enter values into spreadsheet?

Yes, BFZ and SOI are much lower. With BFZ, I think we can attribute that to the presence of the Expeditions, so it might make sense to compare paper and digital prices with a ratio. I’ve done this in the past, but haven’t reproduced it in a while. Basically, I calculate the ratio of (MTGO+25)/TCGMID for each set, with the +25 representing the redemption fee.

Here are the ratio lows for each set, they occur at similar times around rotation to the price bottom.

KTK: 0.45

DTK: 0.48

ORI: 0.40

Here are the current ratios for BFZ and SOI

BFZ: 0.41

SOI: 0.30 (!!!)

Next, small sets,

BNG: 0.52

JOU: 0.59

FRF: 0.42

And OGW and EMN,

OGW: 0.57

EMN: 0.46

So, using the ratios, it looks like value goes like this,

SOI>BFZ and EMN>OGW, though all four sets look to have value and be close to a price bottom using the ratio as the metric of choice. Note, EMN and SOI both did not have expeditions, while OGW and BFZ did.

So, yes, I like the outlook a lot for OGW and EMN, as you suggest based on looking at Modern playable cards. BFZ has two Modern staples in Ulamog and Gideon, plus the creature lands. SOI looks like the worst in terms of playable, but still has Nahiri, Prized Amalgam and Tireless Tracker.

It will be fascinating to see what happens and which ones turns out to give the best return in the end. But all sorts of fundamentals and experiential evidence is lining up in their favor. Too bad this is the last time we’ll be able to get the benefit from the combo of longer redemption windows and rotation!

I always love when you do these rotation analysis. One observation I noticed is that BFZ and SOI are significantly lower in value compared to the other large sets at this point in time. Not really sure what it means though. Next lets move onto the small sets. Based on the data you provided I asked myself how does BNG, FRF, and JOU compare to EMN and OGW in terms of modern playables. JOU was a homerun performance wise with a large chunk of value in eidolon, and keranos. BNG and FRF only had 1-3 really modern playables. EMN has 2 big hitters with Liliana and Collective Brutality plus a number of other fringe playables Emrakul, Selfless spirit, Spell queller, and grim flayer. OGW has thought-knot seer as the big one, with Kalitas, matter reshaper, eldrazi displacer, and the manlands as lower value but very playable. Based on this I think I really like the outlook for these small sets, since there are a lot of modern playables, especially EMN. Also, the last 2 years or so were the pinnacle of undercosted threats, so if theres any new breakout cards I think it will be from these newer sets, since THS block was generaly weaker. So I think these sets will perform more like JOU and less like BNG. Makes me wish I didn’t spend my tix so soon. What are your thoughts?